Everyone Nodded.
Nothing Changed.

For Product teams.

You can't ship what you can't get people to care about.

Influence without authority isn't part of the job. It is the job. Most product leaders worked out a long time ago that the data doesn't close it, but nobody told them what actually does.

Stephanie started out with a Computer Science degree from Cornell, so her career began in tech, and she understands the pain. For more than 20 years, she's watched tech leaders struggle to inspire action even though their data and logical reasoning were well buttoned up. For nearly a decade she's been embedded inside Google helping Product Managers, Product Marketing Manager, Technical Program Managers, and other tech leaders actually move the needle.

The talk is about the gap between a stakeholder who agrees in the review and one who defends the decision when it gets inconvenient. For product people, those two minutes are the difference between an stakeholder who understands the product and a stakeholder who can picture using it and wants to help.

What Product People Say

The story this room remembers

Marcus, a product leader with a devastating, quantified, obviously-actionable finding that could not move his executive team — repeatedly — until he changed how he delivered it. He got his budget and his headcount.